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In February, oil production in Texas hit a 34-year high, with combined oil and condensate volumes exceeding 2.9 million barrels of oil per day. For the first time in memory, Texas now produces more than 36% of all the oil produced in the United States, and if it were a separate country, Texas would now rank as the 8th largest oil producing nation on earth. Wow.

We see endless speculation about how long we should expect the current boom in shale oil and natural gas that is happening in Texas and throughout much of the United States to last. Prophets of doom like proponents of “Peak Oil” theory and radical anti-economic growth activists like Bill McKibben say it’s all a “bubble” that will burst at any moment.

Others actually involved in the development of shale resources tend to believe the correct answer today will be some variation on the theme: “a very long time.” One presenter at the recent Eagle Ford Consortium Conference in San Antonio, Greg Leveille of , told his audience that the 25 county region that makes up the Eagle Ford Shale play should expect to see “decades and decades” of production.

People who live in the Eagle Ford region, the Permian Basin of West Texas, and other significant shale plays around the country naturally worry about when the next “bust” will come, which is not an unreasonable concern to have. Previous conventional oil and gas booms have almost always eventually wound down into a bust at some level. But there are many reasons to believe that the shale boom will be different, and the Eagle Ford play provides a very good example why.

The differences between today’s situation and that of prior booms are many. Start with the fact that previous booms, like the oil boom of the early 1980s, came about due to high oil prices driven by restrictions in supply. The restrictions in the 1980s were artificially driven by OPEC, and prior booms came about simply due to a failure by the global industry to identify adequate new resources. In every case, you had rising demand and limited supplies to meet it.

Today’s boom in the United States is different in that we now have rapidly rising domestic supplies meeting rising demand. Where in the past the United States was forced to rely more and more heavily on imports from OPEC countries to meet its domestic needs, today’s shale boom is enabling our country to actually lower oil imports on a daily basis, having cut them almost in half since 2007. In the meantime, rapidly rising demand in China, Japan, India and the rest of the Pacific Rim is filling the void in U.S. imports, consuming all the oil the OPEC countries and Russia can produce. This all ensures the price of oil will remain healthy enough for the U.S. drilling boom to continue.

Some in the environmentalist movement, like McKibben, promote what they call the “stranded carbon” theory, which posits the world will ultimately leave much of the known oil and gas reserves in the ground due to concerns over climate change. But this scenario is unlikely to become reality, because to do that will mean an end to economic growth in the developed world, and relegating developing nations who need abundant and affordable energy supplies to improve their economies and help move their people out of abject poverty to simply accept their current lot in life.

For at least the next 50 years, fossil fuels are the only available source that is truly scalable to meet those needs. The thought that 4+ billion people who populate developing nations on this planet are going to quietly accept their current fate is unrealistic. Yet, those who promote the “stranded carbon” theory have no real, current alternative to offer to fossil fuels.

To sustain economic growth here in the U.S. and to have any hope of helping move the developing world out of squalor, we are going to need all we can get of every source of energy we can develop. Rather than leave the oil and gas in the ground, it is more likely the human race is innovative enough to develop technologies necessary to deal with the carbon dioxide.

Writing in the Houston Chronicle on April 27, columnist Bill King warned Texans not to put all our eggs in the oil and gas basket, one reason being the potential for development of a “disruptive technology” related to Solar power that would make it more competitive with fossil fuels. That is great advice – we do need to continue to develop renewable fuel sources, and no state or country has done more to aggressively develop wind power than Texas has over the last decade. But even with that continued renewable development, and even if the long-awaited “disruptive technology” related to solar power or hydrogen cars finally comes about, our reality is that the world is still going to need every bit of every source of fuel we can develop.

This isn’t 1984 all over again, and we do not have to live in a world of energy poverty, as some actively advocate. The OPEC nations can still influence the global price of oil to some extent, but the ongoing shale oil boom in the U.S. means they can no longer force Americans to wait in endless lines to fill their tanks with gasoline. We can have a world of energy abundance, and Texas is playing a leading role in making it all happen.